OpenAI Dev Day 2025: ChatGPT becomes the new app store — and the hardware is coming

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In a packed hall at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has set out a bold vision to reshape the digital world. The company that brought generative AI into the mainstream with a simple chatbot is now building the foundations for its next act: an all-encompassing computing platform designed to move beyond the screen and browser, enlisting legendary designer Jony Ive to help shape its physical form.

In it Third annual development dayOpenAI unveiled a set of tools that signal a strategic pivot from model provider to full-fledged ecosystem. The message was clear: the era of asking AI questions is over. The future is about leading AI to perform complex tasks, build software autonomously, and live inside each application, a transition framed as a transition from… "Systems you can ask anything of, and systems you can ask them to do anything for you."

Today’s announcements were a three-pronged attack on the status quo, targeting how users interact with software, how developers build it, and how companies deploy intelligent agents. But the sessions were held behind closed doors, away from… Public live broadcastwhich revealed the true scope of OpenAI’s ambition — a future that includes new hardware, a relentless pursuit of computational power, and a philosophical quest to redefine our relationship with technology.

From chatbot to operating system: the new “app store.”

The main focus of the public-facing speech was transformation ChatGPT itself. With the new SDK applicationsOpenAI is transforming its hugely popular chatbot into a dynamic, interactive platform, and a powerful operating system where developers can create and distribute their own applications.

“Today, we will open up ChatGPT to developers to build real applications within ChatGPT,” Altman announced during the keynote presentation to applause. “This will enable a new generation of interactive, adaptable and personal apps that you can chat with.”

Live demos showcased apps from partners such as Coursera, Canvasand Zillow Works seamlessly within the chat conversation. User can watch machine learning lecture, ask ChatGPT To explain a concept in real time, then use Canva to create a poster based on the conversation, all without leaving the chat interface. Apps can display rich, interactive user interfaces, and even display them in full screen mode to provide a complete experience, such as exploring a Zillow map of homes.

For developers, this represents a powerful new distribution channel. “When you build with the Apps SDK, your apps can reach hundreds of millions of chat users,” Altman said, highlighting the direct path to the massive user base that has grown to over 800 million weekly active users.

In a private press conference later, Nick Turley, president of ChatGPT, spoke about the broader vision. "We never meant to build a chatbot;" He said. "When we set out to build ChatGPT, we aimed to create a superior assistant but got a little sidetracked. And one of the tragedies of getting a little sidetracked is that we’ve built a great chatbot, but we’re the first to say that not all software has to be a chatbot, and not all interaction with the business world has to be a chatbot."

Turley emphasized that although OpenAI is passionate about natural language interfaces, "The interface really needs to evolve, which is why you see a lot of UI in demos today. In fact, you can even go full screen and chat in the background." Describe the future where users can "Start your day with ChatGPT, just because it has become the de facto entry point to the commercial web and to a lot of software," But make that clear "Our incentive is not to keep you inside. Our product is to allow others to build amazing businesses and advance the software form factor."

The Rise of Agents: Building AI to “Do Anything.”

If applications aim to bring the world to ChatGPT, the new "Agent kit" It’s about sending artificial intelligence out into the world to get things done. OpenAI provides a complete file "A set of essential elements… to help you take agents from prototype to production," Altman explained in his keynote.

Agent kit It is an integrated development environment for creating autonomous AI workers. It features a visual canvas for designing complex workflows, and an embeddable chat interface ("Chat kit") for deploying agents in any application, and a sophisticated evaluation suite to measure and improve performance.

A compelling demo of the financial operations platform slope Show how the Agent Kit was used to build a purchasing agent. The employee can simply write, "I need five more ChatGPT workbenches," The agent analyzes the order, checks it against company expense policies, finds the seller’s details, and sets up a virtual credit card for the purchase – a process that previously took weeks, now is completed in minutes.

This push toward agents is a direct response to the growing enterprise need to move beyond AI as a simple information retrieval tool and toward AI as a productivity engine that automates complex business processes. Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, noted that for enterprise adoption, "You needed this kind of shift to a more effective AI that could do things for you, rather than just responding with text output."

Future Code and Jony Ive bBombshell

Perhaps the most profound transformation is occurring in software development itself. Codex AlimentariusOpenAI, the AI ​​coding agent, has moved from a research preview to a full product, now supported by a specialized version of the new GPT-5 model. As one of the speakers said "A teammate who understands your context."

The capabilities are amazing. Developers can now set Codex Alimentarius Tasks directly from SlackThe agent can independently write code, create pull requests, and even review other engineers’ work on it github. The live demo showed Codex taking a simple photo of a whiteboard drawing and turning it into a fully functional, beautifully designed mobile app screen. Another demo showed an app that can "self-development," Reprogramming itself in real time based on the user’s natural language request.

But the biggest surprise of the day came in the closing conversation, which was not broadcast live Altman and Jony Iveformer chief design officer at Apple. The two revealed that they have been collaborating for three years on a new family of devices focused on artificial intelligence.

Ive, whose design philosophy has shaped the iPhone, iMac and Apple Watch, is his creative team’s goal,” said Ive "It became clear" With the launch of ChatGPT. He said that our current relationship with technology is broken and that AI represents an opportunity to fundamentally reset things.

“I think it would be ridiculous to assume that you can have technology that is this amazing, handed down to us through legacy products, products that are decades old,” Ive said. “I see it as an opportunity to use this amazing ability to address a lot of the exhaustion and despair that people are feeling right now.”

While details of the devices remain secret, his motives were spoken in deeply human terms. “We love our species, and we want to be useful. We believe that humanity deserves much better than what humanity in general is given,” he said. He stressed the importance "nursing" In the design process, explaining, "We feel when people care…you feel neglected. You feel that when someone doesn’t care about you, they care about money and schedule."

This collaboration confirms that OpenAI’s ambitions are not limited to the cloud; It is actively exploring the physical interface through which humanity will interact with its powerful new intelligence.

The unquenchable thirst for computing

The entire platform strategy is based on one massive constraint: the availability of computing power. In both the private press conference and the non-broadcast State of the Developers Union, OpenAI leadership returned to this topic again and again.

“The degree to which we are all constrained by computing… everyone is very constrained in terms of being able to provide services at the scale required to generate revenue, and we are very confident at this point that we can move forward quite significantly,” Altman told reporters. He added that even with the huge new hardware partnerships with AMD and others, "We’ll say the same thing again. We are very convinced…there is a lot of demand."

This explains the company’s aggressiveness, Billion-dollar investments in infrastructure. When asked about profitability, Altman was frank that the company is going through a phase "Investment and growth." He quoted a famous quote from Walt Disney, to paraphrase, "We make more money so we can make more movies." For OpenAI, "films" They are more powerful artificial intelligence models than ever before.

Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, laid out the ultimate goal in stark economic terms during the developer’s State of the Union. "Artificial intelligence will, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, become the primary driver of economic growth." He said. "The question “How much computing do you want?” It’s a bit like asking how big a workforce do you want? The answer is that you can always get more from more."

As the day ended and developers mingled at the reception, the scale of the OpenAI project came into focus. Fueled by new models such as the powerful GPT-5 Pro And amazing Sora 2 Video Generator The company is no longer just building artificial intelligence. It is building the world in which AI will live — a world of intelligent applications, autonomous agents, and new physical devices, and is betting that in the near future, intelligence itself will be the ultimate platform.



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